Friday, October 07, 2016

Snopes.com: the latest CIA addition to Internet disinformationBy Wayne Madsen ReportWMR has previously reported on how certain highly-touted websites are nothing more than disseminators of disinformation on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA's presence within the "established" and "accepted" Internet media should come as no surprise. Upon its founding in 1947, the CIA made arrangements to place its agents-of-influence within the newsrooms of America's largest newspapers, as well as all radio and television networks.

The so-called "fact-checking" authentication website Snopes.com is the go-to website for CIA propaganda. On April 19, 2016, WMR reported: "Snopes enjoys a symbiotic relationship with Wikipedia and they often cross-reference their 'anti-conspiracy' drivel. In comments made in Washington, DC two years ago, former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson described Snopes.com and Wikipedia as the two worst reference sites on the Internet. As a telltale sign of their collaboration, the Wikipedia site contains no criticism, such as that leveled by Attkisson and others, against Snopes.com."

We also reported, "Snopes.com is run by a California couple named Barbara and David Mikkelson, who founded the San Fernando Valley Folklore Society . . . The Mikkelsons chose the name Snopes because it is the name of a fictional family featured in William Faulkner's novels that includes a pedophile, a murderer, a bigamist, a corrupt racist politician, and a thief who live in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi. The idea is to label all those targeted by the Mikkelsons as candidates for membership in the Snopes family. As someone who attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where Faulkner lived and wrote, and who took more courses on Faulkner than palatable, this editor can point out that Faulkner also, in creating the Snopes family, had in mind the creation of characters resembling bullshit artists like the Mikkelsons."

Snopes.com is on record calling WMR a "disreputable web site." Nothing says "CIA" more than Snopes.com's description of legitimate news reports of CIA director John Brennan being a Wahhabist and Saudi sympathizer as "bogus."

Snopes's most recent dissembling of the truth was to discount reports from Greece that Turkey has been shipping weapons disguised as furniture shipments to Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and affiliated terrorist groups in North Africa and Europe.

Snopes claims that because the story of a Greek Coast Guard interception of a weapons shipment south of the island of Crete dates from 2015, there is no validity to the Turkish connection to weapons shipments to ISIL terrorists. The ship transporting the weapons was the Bolivian-flaggedHaddad 1, operated by Delta Sea Maritime of Turkey. The vessel had loaded twelve containers at the Egyptian port of Alexandria, a favorite weapons shipment location for the CIA. The ship, before stopping in Famagusta in the "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, loaded another three containers at the Turkish port of Iskenderun, the transit port for the shipment of captured weapons from Muammar Qaddafi's arms warehouses to Syrian jihadist rebels. It was the Iskenderun transport operation that involved the late U.S. envoy to Libya Christopher Stevens; Turkish Consul General in Benghazi Ali Sait Akin; CIA director David Petraeus; and, reportedly, senior advisers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.The CIA had to commission its favorite Internet disinformation site to throw cold water on the Turkish weapons links to ISIL because it threatens to expose the CIA's massive weapons smuggling operations to ISIL terrorists that involved Turi Defense Group of Arizona -- a case just buried by the Department of Justice on orders of the Obama administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign -- and other covert weapons transfers being carried out on the orders of "Al Hadj" John Brennan, veteran of the Islamic ritual pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca.

One of the CIA's smuggling operations entailed the Belgian-based arms manufacturer Fabrique Nationale (FN), which has a CIA-connected subsidiary called FNH-USA. One particular FN rifle, the Fusil Automatique Léger (FAL), was the standard weapon used by the Libyan rebels in 2011 and 2012, including the jihadist group that attacked the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. The FAL, called the "Right Arm of the Free World" during the Cold War, uses only NATO standard rounds. The weapon was never used by the Libyan Army, which relied on Soviet weaponry. Claims by NATO that the rebels were using Libyan weapons captured from Libyan army arsenals and caches were patently false.

Snopes is now questioning Turkey's weapons links to jihadist terrorists in North Africa and Europe. However, photographs do not lie, as seen below. Ammunition and 5,000 shotguns from the Turkish-owned arms dealer Yavex USA were shipped from Istanbul in boxes denoted as plastic office furniture manufactured by the Turkish firm "Senyayla Plastik Sanayi ve Ticaret A/S" of Istanbul. The Turkish government and the CIA had their "plausible deniability" cover story on the intercepted weapons and ammunition ready to go just after the Greek Coast Guard interception: The 492,000 handgun bullets were destined for the Sudanese national police and were to be delivered through the port of Beirut, Lebanon and the 4900 shotguns were "hunting rifles" destined for Lebanese customers. TheHaddad 1 was stopping at the Libyan ports of Misrata and Tobruk, according to the Turkish government, to deliver bags of "cement mix." At the time of the interception, Libya was subject to a United Nations arms embargo.

Yavex's U.S. subsidiary is located at 6361 Corporate Park Circle in Fort Myers, Florida. It is clear that both Yavex USA, Turi Defense Group, and FN-USA, now called FN-America, were involved in a covert CIA weapons smuggling operation in violation of the UN arms embargoes imposed on Libya, and later, on Syria, with the connivance of Hillary Clinton. Not surprisingly, FN-America operates from a post office box in McLean, Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters in Langley.

What may have possessed Hillary Clinton to destroy thousands of State Department emails transmitted, processed, and stored on her personal servers? Perhaps it was her involvement in a major CIA weapons smuggling operation that saw U.S. and NATO weapons being shipped to jihadist terrorists in Libya, Syria, and Europe. As Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton had ultimate authority for approving U.S. weapons transfers abroad pursuant to the Arms Export Control Act.

As far as Snopes.com is concerned, nothing they report should be taken seriously. They are as reliable a news source as The Onion.

Monday, October 03, 2016

The "fact checkers" are correct: Huma Abedin is not associated with the Muslim Brotherhood; she's linked to Al Qaeda By Wayne Madsen ReportOnce again, the conservative media has gotten it wrong. After publishing story after story about Hillary Clinton's closest adviser, Huma Abedin, being linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, the "fact checkers" at The Washington Post, Snopes.com and other media outlets got it correct. Abedin has not been linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. However, what the Post and others failed to investigate is Abedin and her family's links to an organization far worse than the Brotherhood, Al Qaeda.

When Barack Obama's birth certificate became an issue after he was inaugurated as president in 2009, the media also got it very wrong. Obama's birth in Honolulu in 1961 was never at issue. What was a fact was that his Indonesian stepfather renounced young Obama's American citizenship when he was enrolled in an Indonesian school in 1968. Indonesian law prohibits dual citizenship. Obama carried his Indonesian citizenship after he returned to Hawaii. There was never any document provided by Obama showing that he proactively declared his U.S. citizenship before he turned 21 years old. In fact, Obama was enrolled at Occidental College as a foreign student under a Fulbright Scholarship. All of this may have been a problem for many U.S.-Indonesian children, however, with Obama's mother and grandparents being associated with the Central Intelligence Agency, there was never an immigration or naturalization problem for young Barry Soetoro.

Nor does there seem to be a "problem" for Huma Abedin, born in 1976 to an Indian Muslim father, Syed Zainul Abedin, and a Pakistani Muslim mother, Saleha Mahmood Abedin, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. From the age of two to the age of eighteen, Abedin lived with her parents in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and was schooled, as any Muslim woman citizen and resident of Saudi Arabia, in the misogynistic tenets of Wahhabist Islam, the most fundamentalist and radical sect of Islam on the planet.

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) practices an intelligence-gathering technique known as "contact chaining." When NSA analysts are interested in a certain person of interest, they establish a "contact chain," which is graphically represented by names on a relational chart, sometimes interposed on a map. The contact chain is developed by a database code-named MAINWAY, which develops chaining data from a number of meta-databases created from collecting phone numbers associated with the person of interest. In addition to calls made to and from the person of interest, the phone calls to and from their associates and their associates' associates are added to the contact chain.

For example, if MAINWAY was queried on an individual's "Al-Qaida affiliates," the ASSOCIATION database would provide a list of all cell phone calls linked to the target, BANYAN would list all landline calls linked to the same target, and the MARINA database would provide e-mail, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Skype, and other web-associated links. In addition, other NSA databases would provide global positioning system (GPS) data on the target and his or her associates gleaned from mobile phone companies and GPS companies like Tom Tom, Mio Technology, and NAVICO.

Example of NSA contact chaining for the email chains of two executives of the Chinese telecommunications firm Huawei.

Example of an NSA contact chaining diagram for phone calls only.If Huma Abedin's name were entered into NSA's MAINWAY query option, there is no doubt that her contact chain would yield some interesting results. However, using information gleaned from bona fide news organizations and other research sites, WMR was able to develop a contact chaining chart for Abedin that yields some alarming results. For example, Abedin, a former assistant editor for her mother's Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, was only four degrees of separation from Wa'el Hamza Jalaidan, the founder of Al Qaeda.

Ms. Abedin was also four degrees of separation from Sayid Qtub, a professor at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a sister college of Abedin's mother's Dar al-Hekma College for women, also in Jeddah. Qtub was the inspirational teacher of Al Qaeda's Osama Bin Laden and Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, both of whom attended King Abdulaziz University. The two colleges are steeped in Wahhabist doctrine and have been nest eggs for radical Salafist and Wahhabist terrorist movements around the world.

Those who have attempted to link Abedin with the Muslim Brotherhood could not be further from the truth. The Brotherhood believes that Islamist domination can be achieved through the democratic electoral process, as previously seen in Egypt before a military coup ousted the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government of Mohamed Morsi. In fact, the pro-Saudi Salafist party in Egypt supported the military coup in its ouster of the Brotherhood, longtime enemies of radical Wahhabism and Salafism.

Huma Abedin's "contact chaining" diagram. One produced by NSA would be even more detailed and alarming for someone who might end up inside Hillary Clinton's Oval Office as a fully-cleared, for all security levels and compartments, presidential adviser. Click on image for larger display.

By trying to link Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood, an entire lifetime of her connections to Saudi Wahhabism, Salafism, and jihadism was overlooked, either by accident or by design.

Syed Qtub and Mohammed Qtub, his brother who succeeded him at King Abdulaziz University, opposed the Muslim Brotherhood's tactic of achieving power through the electoral process. The two brothers who provided inspiration for Al Qaeda believe that power must be achieved through jihad, or holy war, and violence through terrorism is a justifiable means to an end.

It is the Islamic Wahhabist and Salafist schools of thought, both baselines for Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, which grew out of Al Qaeda in Iraq, that are most closely associated with Huma Abedin, whose path also crossed at George Washington University with another Al Qaeda figure, Anwar al-Awlaki, the Denver-born Islamic cleric who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. Although WMR's contact chain on Abedin was not extended beyond six or seven degrees of separation, Awlaki's network included many Al Qaeda- and Islamic State-inspired terrorists, including the Christmas Day 2009 "underwear bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 2009 Little Rock armed forces recruiting office shooter Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (Carlos Leon Bledsoe), the 2010 Times Square attempted bomber Faisal Shahzad, Fort Hood mass shooter Major Nidal Malik Hasan, British Labor Cabinet member Stephen Timms's stabber Roshonara Choudhry, 2013 Boston Marathon bombing brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 2015 San Bernardino Indlan Regional Center mass shootersSyed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, and 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub mass shooter Omar Mateen.

Although WMR did not extend Huma Abedin's contact chain beyond what could be represented on a single contact chain diagram, if NSA were to conduct a contact chain analysis on Ms. Abedin, it would include all of the aforementioned terrorists. And by extending Huma Abedin's contact chain of known terrorists by just one degree of separation, the Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, would be included in the Al Qaeda/Islamic State contact chain, as well.